The new policy:VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlementVMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlementMax vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAMVMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB ( <- my assumption)VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GBVMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GBThe amount of vRAM that counts against your vRAM license pool will be capped to 96GB per VM !!! In other words, even if you assign 256GB or the new 1TB limit of RAM to a VM, it will only count as 96GB for your license.

I'm waiting for the official announcement, but if its true, this is a good step in the right direction and will essentially qwell the uprising that came from the initial announcement. One thing that does bother me is how VMWare was so far off the mark when it came to what their customers were running. Saying that it would affect 2% when the reality was a number more like 50%.

Yeah we had a meeting with our rep that was canceled with an unofficial word that they are announcing the changes next week. For us this is acceptable pricing, we were looking at a doubling of cost so doubling the entitlement means we are looking at basically the same cost.

Being cynical I wonder if this was the plan all along so that the "slightly less shitty" licensing policy seems a lot more attractive than it would have been if it was their initial licensing policy.

I don't think so, I'm pretty sure senior management was fed bad data and acted on it. I'm not opposed to a company making money but a doubling of our costs was going to push vmware out as a viable option as they were already the premium offering with the premium price. This pricing means our cost per machine is roughly constant from the current version and dropping the cores per socket number means we can be a bit more liberal with vSMP machines once the SB based Xeons are available.

It still feels like a money-grab, now with a hamfisted manipulation attempt added in via the "piss 'em off with the crazy limits first, then announce the ones we'd intended all along" approach. It means I'm not actualy regarded as one of VMware's customers, nor are my needs or strategies based upon their product taken into account in any meaninful way.

This change repairs some of the damage to our existing Essentials+ cluster's operational lifetime plan (RAM upgrade in 1+ year), but I'm still not seeing whether the Hypervisor standalone product remains capped into uselessness at 8GB, or bumps up to 12GB in line with the other changes.

Either way, they've tried this once and will likely do so again. Damage done and now they're on my "Vendors to Anticipate Screwage From" list. Next version (v3) of Hyper-V gets an honest evaluation spot in our environment plus migration plan. When our support's up in about 2 years we'll be ready.

this. Though I'm still not convinced that they had "bad data", they have pretty good info on how their customers are using their product. The original entitlements far exceeded average utilization. And they obviously grasped that people were going to be getting far more utilization out of each license in the future, which is why they made the change. What I think they missed the mark on was how many customers were planning on bumping up memory capacity in the immediate future. Every one of my customers that I spoke with had plenty of vRAM for what they were doing. They were also well into the planning stages for refreshing that hardware with shitloads of memory and planning to use it.

As an aside, what most of my customers missed, and what made them feel better about the new entitlements, was that under the old license scheme there was a 6-core per socket limit on Enterprise and a 12-core per socket limit on Ent+. More than a few of them were planning on buying new 8 core or 10 core E7 boxes for their existing Enterprise licenses and would have had to upgrade or buy additional licenses anyway. For one of them, it was cheaper with the new vs5 license scheme, for most of the others it was within a few licenses either way of the same. For those looking at refresh in the 12-18 month timeframe, 16+ core procs would have been a possibility requiring even more licenses.

Enterprise Plus should be 128GB (bearable) or 256GB (realistic in 2011) and then everything else down on from that.

This is per socket, I doubt many customers are assigning more that 192GB per dual socket box and way less than 1% are assigning anywhere near 512GB per dual socket box. Those numbers may become realistic in the next couple years but it will be mostly from people buying fewer replacement hosts and so they will be able to transfer those licenses to the bigger hosts. I personally think these numbers probably strike a fair balance between VMWare's revenue and our cost per VM, they'd be even fairer if it were used pRAM instead of vRAM as VMWare has been pretty vocal in marketing about using memory overcommit (we never have, in fact we leave enough free pRAM in the clusters to accommodate a single host failure as we were much more concerned about maintaining performance and hence driving adoption as we needed to avoid a large capital project to build a second datacenter. Any performance killing slip up like memory swapping would have had fairly devastating consequences for us).

Essentials Plus with 192GB vRAM entitlement is basically barely sufficient to run 3x96GB hosts at 2+1 redundancy with no overcommit, nothing more. 16GB DIMMs are already becoming price-competitive with 8GB; by the time Xeon E5 servers come on the market, they'll be advantageous, and your typical host will run 192GB to 256GB RAM. At this point, Essentials Plus becomes useless, as three hosts' worth of vRAM entitlement will get eaten by one with room to spare.

This is pretty good news. I wonder if they are making any adjustments to the free hypervisor.

A whole lot of the "whining" about the licensing changes was coming from users of the free versions, ie. the Ramoras of the industry.

Those free samples are about ultimately selling actual revenue generating product, and keeping market share away from competitors (no doubt among other things...but mostly those two...)

So it makes sense, for that first goal, to keep applying carrots and sticks to the users of the free versions to get them into the revenue stream. If they judge that restricting the free version a bit will make some of those users jump onto their for-pay products that may well out-balance the percentage that abandon the product line for competitors.

Several people here essentially posted stories in the other related thread about how they had exploited free software for commercial use and how these changes would effect them. I doubt that EMC/VMWare will shed many tears over their discomfort; they were leeching off the product anyway. But if the businesses that are running their IT infrastructure on those free installs honestly evaluate the costs of licensing versus re-engineering to another hypervisor, many will determine that their best course of action is to pay up.

So while I have no clue what will actually happen, it makes every sense to me that VMWare will ultimately reduce the usefulness of their free versions as part of nudging people into their payed product lines

That's because it is. VMware seems to be feeling the squeeze from Hyper-V, and they're juggling their licenses to generate more income from fewer customers.

I've already suggested to a customer that they buy another copy of Essentials 4 NOW for their immediate and short-term needs, and to switch to Hyper-V for their long-term needs. I see nothing in this announcement to change that suggestion.

I still don't understand why VMware decided on licensing based on vmem instead of pmem. Use of pmem would be easier to verify and manage. I expect that fewer customers would have been upset about pmem licensing.

Also, one of VMware's core features is memory overcommit (supported by memory dedupe). Licensing by vmem means that customers need to pay for the efficiencies of VMware. Licensing by pmem lets customers think they're getting a better deal.

Zaphod wrote:

A whole lot of the "whining" about the licensing changes was coming from users of the free versions, ie. the Ramoras of the industry.

Those free samples are about ultimately selling actual revenue generating product, and keeping market share away from competitors (no doubt among other things...but mostly those two...)

So it makes sense, for that first goal, to keep applying carrots and sticks to the users of the free versions to get them into the revenue stream. If they judge that restricting the free version a bit will make some of those users jump onto their for-pay products that may well out-balance the percentage that abandon the product line for competitors.

Several people here essentially posted stories in the other related thread about how they had exploited free software for commercial use and how these changes would effect them. I doubt that EMC/VMWare will shed many tears over their discomfort; they were leeching off the product anyway. But if the businesses that are running their IT infrastructure on those free installs honestly evaluate the costs of licensing versus re-engineering to another hypervisor, many will determine that their best course of action is to pay up.

If you're running the free ESXi, the infrastructure probably isn't complex enough to make the conversion too painful. VMware is closing the door on new paying customers through migration. SOME will continue to come through that path, but not as many as have been.

For those organizations that already have a substantial VMware investment, their choice is to migrate, stagnate or pay up. I expect there willl be quite a few of the first and second.

Zaphod wrote:

So while I have no clue what will actually happen, it makes every sense to me that VMWare will ultimately reduce the usefulness of their free versions as part of nudging people into their payed product lines

While I agree on your analysis of their goal, I expect Microsoft is happy with VMware's new licensing

Disclaimer: I'm a VMware Partner. I guess it's time to start coming up to speed on Hyper-V & KVM

I'm something that VMware seems care even less for; one of their SMB customers with fewer than 20 physical servers.

A little over a year ago I convinced my company to BUY a PAID suite (Essentials+) that met our needs initially and have watched its long-term viability decline with the v5 license changes. I've no issue with the performance or reliability of VMware's product, but there's seriously mixed signals from v4 to v5 on how buinsesses are expected to make production use of virtualization. The loss of that focus is disconcerting for someone tasked with extracting actual value from an IT infrastructure...i.e. "work". As it is, we'll adapt, in this case likely by choosing a less capable but adequate product instead of drinking the "best of breed" kool-aid in the future.

In the last month, VMware made a hell of a lot of extra work for me instead of "freeing IT up to focus on productivity". In fact, no one should expect to have a vendor yank the carpet out from under them on a product they've already bought. As for my complaints on the Hypervisor product, I'm using said product for its advertised purpose as a low-cost entry-level hypervisor and proof of concept to spur virtualization adoption in our enterprise. What do you know, it DID result in the purchase of their paid product at our headquarters.

VMware's chiseling began in earnest right after we bought a paid product. I lost the ability to manage/perform backups in a streamlined manner on our remote office servers (i.e. VMware made 3rd party backup API access a violation of license), the ability to run a free vCLI appliance on my free hypervisor (an upgoming gem in the v5 license) in my remote offices, and now 4GB of already installed RAM in each server will effectively go dark if I upgrade (again due to license stipulations in v5). See a trend? I am.

Successful products are supposed to increase in capability over time, not stagnate or decline.

That thing you bought a year ago, it is unchanged from when you bought it, isn't it?

If you like it, you can keep using it in a supported manner for a number of years more.

If you really really like it you can continue to use it even after support declines.

If you want to buy more of what you already own, you can still do that. I know that you can purchase licenses for V5 and then downgrade them to V4 (it says so here), and I believe that effectively downgrades the license terms as well (but I'd take correction on that if there is a good reference).

If you really really hate version 5 you never have to buy or run it.

If you get 5 or so years of use out of an infrastructure purchase you really shouldn't be in the hole over it, you certainly were going to have to review and renew maintenance during that period.

Did you sell your management solely based on how you dreamed the future might turn out?

Even if I add a second processor, I'm still 8GB over what I'm allowed to have in my current lab.

I'll echo the sentiments of VMware pushing personal and SMB markets to either pay up in licenses or move to another product.

I saw the value of purchasing a Microsoft Technet subscription for myself. $250/year for their entire library of software to play with. Not seeing the value of paying $560 to use all my current hardware to continue using my home lab with the latest version.

At my current work we do zero virtualization, so home lab is the only place for me to play with hypervisors. I'm either reinstalling VMware ever 60 days now, or putting it on a 4-5 year old Core2Duo box and powering it up when I feel bored.

Zaphod, please allow me to remove your confusion. Or at least let you know how an IT department on a limited budget operates. We plan for things, usually the more money being spent, the more planning has to be done. It's reasonable to have a set of expectations for how you'll use a product over the term of support for said product. You can't plan for what was changed in v5. It's upset me. Upset people complain.

I bought Essentials+, and 3 years of support about a year ago. I justified the cost of paying in advance in the fair certainty that at least one major new version of the software would be released during over 2010-2013. In order to leaverage one of the prime benefits of having that ongoing support, you'd expect to be able to upgrade to newer versions/capabilities over the covered term. The newly introduced original entitlements of v5 limit blew the living snot out of our scale-up plans...you know the whole marketing drivel VMware spouted about upgrading host machines to meet client performance expectations rather than adding costly servers as of v4 and over the past 5-7 years?

Staying pat (and eventually dropping off the edge of support) IS an answer, but not a very palatable one. It's the response I'd expect coming from the licensing vendor, not from someone such as yourself. Forgive me my surprise.

It's a little better with the likely announcement this thread references...but it is galling treatment from a vendor.

Exactly. Presumably vmware aren't going to refund the subscription part of SnS for people who paid in advance for upgrade entitlement but are now screwed unless they hand over yet more (unbudgeted) money?

It's the response I'd expect coming from the licensing vendor, not from someone such as yourself. Forgive me my surprise.

Hmmm. Here's an answer:

When dealing with resource and service oriented software (think operating systems, database engines, mail applications, ...pretty much everything a sysadmin deals with that facilitates the application layer) it is honestly pretty rare IME to be able to just blindly stay current. Typically movement to new releases is blocked by something like application dependancies, labor available to develop/test, changes in on the vendor side, it's always something.

NT4 - hard to kill

Windows 2000 server - damn difficult, to the point where I can still find several 2000 servers, or desktops being used for server duties running it.

Server 2003 - hell, we are still deploying 2003 boxes when they are required.

According to a front page article here at Ars Windows XP has just this month finally slipped to less than 50% of logged browser traffic. In July of 2011 the single most popular desktop OS is still Windows XP!

Various MS/SQL, Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, database version upgrades: same deal.

Groupwise, Exchange, Lotus Notes...yup, same.

That's all general.

To be specific, if you thought that VMWare was a safe bet not to change their licensing within the next three years (or two, to allow for your purchase date) then I'm going to say that your research, both on their past behaviors, and on their direction and planning, was deficient.

We currently have Enterprise+ licenses, before that they were Enterprise, before that they were something different, and I honestly believe that before that they were something different yet. And I know that we paid licensing conversion fees both to get to the E+, and to E levels. I do not know if the previous bumps were financially impactful, they may not have been.

In all cases VMWare has been consistent in productizing new features as a way of soliciting license upgrades.

And it is not at all news that their license per socket model is due for an overhaul. We have socket licenses that were purchased to run on really old XEON CPUs that were single or hyperthreaded and not even dual-cored, and that supported just 6GB of RAM for a two socket box. The amount of "virtualization" achievable per socket in a contemporary system is easily 20-60 times what those were capable of. Hell many of us have been using VMWare long enough to remember feeling pretty lucky that they went with sockets rather than cores a few years ago. And everyone knew that was just a transitory phase.

I completely understand the function of acting outraged at these changes, we're doing that too. But I can't get behind the idea that they are cheating you out of what you paid for. And I certainly can't believe that anyone who pays the slightest attention is the tinyest bit surprised.

I think the disconnect is that we thought we were buying a product from VMware, not a licensing model. This really should be v1 of a new product, as there is no v4-v5 upgrade, it is completely *changing* what is being purchased and used.

Veam had been my initial planned solution...I could swear that earlier versions supported standalone ESXi back about a year or so ago. Nowadays? Data's more important than the server image itself...that's backed up already and I'm spinning up BackupExec 2010R3 + VI agent + Dedup option to handle the VM's themselves. It just doesn't seem to take that long to build a server from scratch these days, y'know?

Zaphod - 'm feeling better now that sleep, coffee and food (in some order) have happened. Ronnelson put it better than me a couple of posts up (sans my bitching)...what's really got my goat in all of this isn't VMware's normal changes over time. They're welcome (encouraged, even) to come up with new monetized features and capabilities and I guess they must tweak licensing to make those features appealing to their customers. I just plain feel that the v5 changes are a stark break from the past and the manner they were introduced give the impression that someone at VMware knew exactly what they were doing, and that it would piss a lot of people off, and chose to do it anyways.

I probaly wouldn't have been as pissed off if a VMware-VAR pre-sales consulting and evaluation team hadn't sat in my office a year ago post cap-analysis and in great detail explained how I could build a 3-host cluster, save a big hit of money through consolidation from our aging fleet, and scale it up to meet the needs of a larger project we had on the horizon just by adding some commodity RAM a year or so later. That VMware had just rolled the basic vMotion capablity in as a common feature to the non-Enterprise/Advanced product suite seemed to be pretty good gesture of intent to provide maximum value for the owners of their products. I was convinced and the solution's worked pretty well to date, which makes the recent developments maybe a bit more dissapointing that they should be.

As for the rest...eh, you're right. Keeping current isn't the end-all/be-all, keeping the systems operational so that people can get work done is for most shops, mine included. But the new goody part of me still keeps sputtering "but...but...v5 is one more than v4!"

That's because it is. VMware seems to be feeling the squeeze from Hyper-V, and they're juggling their licenses to generate more income from fewer customers.

Actually, from everything I've seen and heard, they have MORE customers but those more customers are buying fewer licenses because of higher consolidation ratios which was what prompted the change.

So they change the licensing so that using their products makes it less cost-effective to run high consolidation ratio. Great thinking, really, in particular since I don't see the RAM getting more expensive over time or application stacks requiring less of it.

This really reminds me of Novell's "great" strategy. The one that decided that they didn't want small customers any more because they where making far more money of large accounts. Served them well in the end.

But that's OK: we're a small shop and only have two VMWare farms, both in 2+1 mode (one with Essential and one with Essential Plus). Switching to Hyper-V shouldn't be too hard once we run out of vRam licenses. It'll be cheaper too. In the end, everyone will be happy: VMWare will be rid on my pesky SMB and we'll be rid of a cost item and back in the "loving" arms of MS.

Hey, I didn't say it was going to be easy for you. In my case, it shouldn't be too hard to switch the next time we change hardware (which will probably the time when vRam licensing will require us to buy MUCH more expensive licenses).

Just got the official email, all edition below Enterprise got bumped to 32GB (including Free) and instead of being a high water mark it's now a rolling 12 month average. The Free edition has this note which is hard to interpret for me "this limit is GB of physical RAM per physical server".

Just got the official email, all edition below Enterprise got bumped to 32GB (including Free) and instead of being a high water mark it's now a rolling 12 month average. The Free edition has this note which is hard to interpret for me "this limit is GB of physical RAM per physical server".

Seems straightforward to me; 32GB/Free server, instead of 32/GB per socket in the paid licenses.

And it is not at all news that their license per socket model is due for an overhaul. We have socket licenses that were purchased to run on really old XEON CPUs that were single or hyperthreaded and not even dual-cored, and that supported just 6GB of RAM for a two socket box. The amount of "virtualization" achievable per socket in a contemporary system is easily 20-60 times what those were capable of. Hell many of us have been using VMWare long enough to remember feeling pretty lucky that they went with sockets rather than cores a few years ago. And everyone knew that was just a transitory phase.

And if you were paying 20-60 times more for that hardware, it might be reasonable for VMware to hike its prices in response.

But you're not. You're probably not even paying as much now as you were then. Pay the same--or less--and get greater utility. That's called progress, and I think it's one of the big reasons that VMware's new pricing is so unwelcome. It's akin to Microsoft doubling the cost of Windows 7 just because it does so much more than Windows XP--and yet, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the price has gone down, not up.

¹ Note: this change will NOT be reflected in the native vCenter™ Server 5 vRAM reporting capability at GA time; it will be included in a future vCenter Server 5 update release. However, before such update release is available, customers will be able to use a stand-alone free utility for tracking vRAM usage that will reflect this change.